The present invention relates generally to a rapid prototyping of micro-electromechanical structures. In particular, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for fabricating encapsulated micro-channels in a substrate.
Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) provide a technology which enables the miniaturization of electrical and mechanical structures. MEMS is a field created primarily in the silicon area, where the mechanical properties of silicon (or other materials such as aluminum, gold, etc.) are used to create miniature moving components. In fact, the MEMS area has been applied to the miniaturization and integration of frequency selected devices to bring such devices to the chip level. In addition, MEMS has also been applied to biological systems in order to create fluidic micro-systems in the area of micro-fluidics.
Micro-machining is a technology with specific application to MEMS systems and is broadly defined as the selective removal of silicon substrates to result in suspended structures on membranes. Both micro-machining and MEMS can also be applied to GaAs, quartz and ceramic substrates. Specifically, micro-machining can aid in the building of integrated circuits. For example, using direct-write ion beam milling, integrated circuits can be quickly and easily debugged, as well as verified. The verification and debugging occurs by milling of the circuits to cut and paste conductors, resistors, capacitors or the like, or change the conductance, inductance or resistance values of these devices.
Moreover, direct-write micro-machining provides significant advantages, as opposed to batch processing of circuits using traditional photo-lithographical techniques, which require the creation of masks in order to implement devices within integrated circuits. For example, in the area of micro-fluidics, conventional design of the various channels within the micro-fluidic devices requires the design of masks to create the structures on a fabricated wafer. As described above, this can be very time consuming. For example, in fluidic micro-systems, the characterization of channels generally requires wafer fabrication and the creation of masks in order to create and test such devices. Accordingly, the rapid prototyping of radio frequency (RF) micro-systems, as well as fluidic micro-systems, is not feasible using traditional techniques, such as photolithographic masking techniques, especially in bio-fluidic applications.
Therefore, there remains a need to overcome one or more of the limitations in the above-described, existing art.